Trending Tags

Follow

About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Microserver News: HP Picks Intel, Calxeda Reveals Benchmarks

The concept of microservers—servers with less powerful microprocessors, often grouped together to provide a lot of performance with lower power requirements—inched a bit closer to reality last week. HP and Calxeda both made announcements that take the concept closer to product.

The most important statement came from HP, which announced its Project Moonshot last November, with a plan to build a system that could accommodate thousands of servers per rack in a federated architecture designed for massively "scale out" systems.

Surprisingly, HP announced last week that it is partnering with Intel on the first iteration of the commercial products, code-named Gemini. The platform itself involves a chassis that is capable of taking various kinds of "server cartridges." Paul Santeler, vice president and general manager of HP's Hyperscale Business Unit, said the idea is to have different cartridges for different workloads.

The first of these will be based on Intel's upcoming Centerton chip, based on the Atom CPU design. Santeler said HP picked the Intel chip because it offers 64-bit and error-correcting code (ECC) support. Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel's Cloud Infrastructure Group, later explained that Centerton is a dual-core 32nm SoC (system on chip) that uses just 6 watts, compared with the 150 watts or so used by Intel's higher-end Xeon server chips. Its features include virtualization capability, hyperthreading, and software compatibility.

Centerton is slated to be available in the second half of this year, and the first Gemini systems are due out by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, in a separate announcement at the Structure Conference last week, Waxman said that Centerton will be followed next year by a 22nm version known as Avoton.

Santeler talked about how Project Moonshot hopes to be "disruptive," allowing for the same amount of compute power, but using less energy and costing less money. This is particularly appropriate for things like instances of Hadoop or Memcached that are not CPU bound, or for simple Web surfing. He noted that the current Project Moonshot website is run on a Centerton server, yet can accommodate 2,500 concurrent webpages, and is able to do this in a 12 to 14 watt power envelope. However, he did not rule out other kinds of chips for future server cartridges.

While I always take vendor benchmarks with a grain of salt, these spotlight how in some applications, input/output (I/O) can become saturated well before the traditional server CPU is used, so combining more smaller CPUs can be much more efficient. As always, we'll need to see final products to really know how well this works in the real world, but the concept is intriguing.

In related news, Dell announced that it is shipping a prototype ARM-based server known as "Copper" based on Marvell ARM-based CPUs, and Mitac showed a different approach using the same CPU at Computex.

Many, perhaps most, workloads are CPU dependent, and for those applications, traditional CPUs will continue to make the most sense. But for smaller, I/O driven applications, microservers may well become a significant market over the next year.

I was particularly interested in reports that Facebook is looking at "wimpy cores" as a way of improving performance per watt. It has said that even if it needs more cores, that's worth the tradeoff. The company has tested Tilera's multicore products and has showed interest in a subscription model of buying processors. Facebook has been pushing its OpenCompute project as a way to get vendors to think about "Web scale" infrastructure, and microservers could likely be a part of that.

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service

//our current issue

Select Term:

24 issues for $29.99 ONLY $1.25 an issue! Lock in Your Savings!

12 issues for $19.99ONLY $1.67 an issue!

State

Country

This transaction is secure

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service